Corridors
It started in my grandma’s care home in 2013.
Being a photographer, a person who captures moments, is in part living in the past. I spend hours of my life going through photographs from previous years, looking for project submissions or previous client work. As someone as nostalgic as me, this is usually a nice experience. I get to re-live so much of my life through the images I’ve captured. Sometimes it can make me sad, but usually I am glad to have visual proof of the memories my brain might not have held on to fully.
I have recently been collating photographs of corridors, because I realised I cannot stop taking them. I am not sure why this has become a fascination, but it has. I thought it started a year ago, but as I’ve been combing through my archives I have found more and more evidence that in fact I have always been subconsciously obsessed with corridors.
Today I found a corridor that was lost to time, as far as I was concerned. When I was 19 I went to Costa Rica with my mum and my brother, one of the many trips we took in the year following my father’s death that shaped my adult life. It was the last time I saw my grandma, and she was already needing so much care she was living in a home. We went to visit and I took her photograph. I got shots her things, her glasses, her with my mum and my aunt. And then, I photographed the care home. And there it is, a single shot of the corridor with an empty bed at the end of the hall. By far, not my best corridor shot, certainly the first.
That trip alone I photographed 5 or 6 corridors, including a photograph famous among my family which my mother had printed A0 for her wall. It’s of the ruins of Sanatorio Durán, in Cartago, and features the most gorgeous checkered floor paired with paint stripping from green walls. I loved it when I took it and I still love it now.
As time has passed I have photographed all kinds of corridors on instinct, people’s homes, offices, airports, museums, anything that leads somewhere else. I have yet to quite pen down what it is about the corridor that captures so fully my camera, but I’m sure the starting point of Corridor Picture 1 may lead to some useful armchair psychoanalysis. I’ll let you be the judge on that one.
